The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare (28 page)

Passenger profiling was big too. Gringo males travelling solo were almost always pulled up by the cops, questioned and searched. Most, like Billy, were nabbed as they stepped through the front door. Cases searched and bingo, the bags of white coke were found. Others also swallowed it in condoms. Up to six at a time full of capsules of coke up to half a kilo could be taken. One Nigerian inmate, Arikawe, an enormous bodybuilder, said he had swallowed a kilo before he got caught. But this large amount was rare. The cops would march them to a toilet in the airport and wait for hours till it passed. They were hardly pros, though, if people like me could smuggle out thousands of euros’ worth of coke from their seized haul in a talcum-powder bottle.

Overall, though, it seemed everybody was getting caught. Nabbed and then paraded in front of the cameras. Mug shot in the papers. Another gringo bites the dust. More ‘great’ work by the Venezuelan security at the airport.

But it was all window-dressing. Father Pat filled us in on the news on the outside world, and I learned other bits from the newspapers brought in by families on the visits. One story raging in the press was about a report released by US anti-drugs chiefs saying Venezuela was the prime route for coke smuggled from Colombia to Europe. They said over 200 tonnes of the stuff passed through the country every year. The bulk of the charlie was flown in by light aircraft from neighbouring Colombia, often onto military airstrips deep in remote areas in Venezuela. So it didn’t take a bright spark to figure out who in Venezuela was behind that. Chávez, not one to take a kicking from the US, went on TV with his usual chant: ‘Yankees go home.’ He put his words into action and booted out the US’s anti-drugs officers.

* * *

Terry got word he had a court hearing. This had happened many times before: he was carted off to the courthouse and the judge never heard his case. This time he was sure it was different. ‘I can feel it, Paul,’ he said. ‘They will let me out of here this time.’

‘See you later, Terry,’ I said, giving him a wink. ‘See you around.’ A helper he paid to take care of him then wheeled him out of the wing.

‘
Mañana seguro,
’ (‘Tomorrow for sure’) he said, laughing. He never came back from the courthouse that night. Rather than feeling down about someone going free while I was still stuck in Los Teques, I was in high spirits. It gave me a lift seeing him get out. Made me think that some day not so far off I’d get out of this dump too.

* * *

It was March. St Patrick’s Day was looming. A few weeks before, a few of the boys were on to me to mark it. ‘Paul, Paddy’s Day, we’ll have to have a few drinks,’ said Aussie Bruce. All the lads were looking forward to drowning the shamrock with an Irishman. The pressure was on to fly the flag for Ireland and put on a bit of entertainment, so I rolled up my sleeves and spent a couple of weeks making a bucket of home brew: about 18 litres of liquor we called jugo loco. I ran around gathering the ingredients – yeast, sugar and so on – and got to work, brewing up the booze in my empty cooking-oil drum.

When it was ready I put out the word: ‘Right, Paddy’s Day in the canteen at midday.’ I slowly walked up the passageway to the rancho and ran the gauntlet of cops, my arm straining under the weight of the 18 litres of booze. Normally during the run-up to Venezuelan national holidays the cops would check all the buckets going to the canteen to see if there was illicit booze – but they weren’t clued in to any Irish ones.

A good few of us got together with myself and Billy, including Hanz, three South Africans – Dieter, Henrik and Capetown – and Tibor, an inmate from Hungary. Tibor had white skin the colour of snow and walked with his right foot dragging slightly. I presumed it was something he had been born with, but I wasn’t going to ask him in case he was offended. To fly the Irish colours I wore my trusted green rugby shirt, which I still had, and my Dublin hat with the light-blue and navy-blue stripes – the team colours of Dublin’s GAA Irish football team. Billy wasn’t into dressing up and wore nothing special for the occasion. I supposed his pale Paddy skin was Irish enough for the festivities.

The drink did the trick and we all got merry, sliding out the bucket from under the table and ladling in our coffee mugs for a refill. I sang out a few traditional Irish tunes, from ‘The Fields of Athenry’ to ‘Molly Malone’. In between we played cards and did a couple of lines of coke. The craic was great and I was doing my bit to mark Paddy’s Day, thousands of miles from home locked up with armed loonies in a circus behind bars.

At the end of the afternoon myself and Billy stumbled back to the wing with an empty bucket for the número. I felt light-headed from the coke and booze. Shortly after the headcount I climbed into my bunk bed and put my head on the pillow. I looked back on the day. I’d enjoyed the craic, but I’d never been more homesick. All I could think about was wanting to be back down at the pub with my mates having a pint.

Only the month before I’d rung in my second birthday in Los Teques. I was 45 when I was banged up; now I was 47. I was getting older, and my kids and family were starting to become distant memories. I did speak to my son, Dano, a bit on the phone, however. But despite asking my family to get my daughter Katie to call, she didn’t. I hadn’t heard from her in over a year and a half. I let you down Katie, sorry, was all I could think. I lay there in bed, twisting and turning. Sleep then saved me and wrenched me off into a less painful world.

* * *

I walked over to Roberto with Silvio. He was sitting on the lower bed of a bunk, being one of only two non-Venezuelan prisoners to have a bed – me being the other.

‘Tell him I have the cash,’ I said, ‘the two million bolos for the passport.’

Silvio interpreted. ‘He says OK, you pay him and he’ll start making calls.’

‘Great.’ I got the cash from a friend back home. I’d sent him an email asking him to wire 1,000 euro to Father Pat’s Western Union account. In a couple of weeks he came through. Brilliant. Father Pat brought it in to me in dribs and drabs over a few visits. He changed it on the black market and I got about ten million bolos for it.

The next day Silvio had news. ‘Roberto has things to say about your passport.’

‘Good.’ I jumped off my bucket next to the door of the yard where I always sat.

‘He says he can have a passport for you soon, a Dutch one.’

‘Dutch?’ I said. My brow furrowed into a knot.

‘Yes, there are Dutch colony islands off the coast of Venezuela.’

‘Oh yeah.’ I remembered Silvio pointing out Aruba on the map in the classroom.

‘OK, he has the money,’ Silvio told Roberto, ‘but we need a photo.’

‘How are we going to do that in here?’

‘We will sort something.’ I decided to change my appearance. I thought it was better that I looked nothing like my original passport. I had visions of that photo being used as a mug shot in a ‘Wanted’ poster in Venezuela if I went on the run. The next day I sat in the yard and paid one of the in-house barbers a few bolos to shave my head. I also retired my razor and within a week had a decent enough beard.

‘OK,’ said Silvio, ‘it’s back on. Roberto has made some calls.’

‘Paul, sit,’ said Roberto. ‘We doing passport photo now,’ he said, grinning.

‘Do I need to wear clogs and eat Edam cheese?’

‘Is what?’ he said, puzzled.

‘Nothing, just joking.’

I sat down beside him on the bunk bed. Roberto then hung down a sheet over the wall behind me as a background for the photo. He stood up off the bed holding his phone at me, a BlackBerry – only the best for Roberto.

‘OK, Paul, stay still.’
Click.
‘It is done, look.’

I sat forward and studied the photo. It was a picture of a bald guy with a gaunt face and a beard. I looked like Robinson Crusoe on chemo. Perfect. Nothing like me and, although the photo looked a bit blurry, it would do the job.

As soon as I got the passport I’d pull off a stroke. Colombia, here I come!

THE BOOZE WAS FLOWING OUT IN THE CANTEEN AGAIN. THIS TIME IT WAS in honour of Bruce’s birthday. Rum and Cokes, no cheap home brew for him. Myself and Vito were enjoying this rare treat, filling our coffee mugs from the bottle of rum under the table. We were well on, giggling and laughing, then cupping our hands to our mouths when a cop popped his head into the canteen wondering if there was a party or something. When he disappeared I steadied my hand under the stone bench and filled our cups with another round. But the rum, a local tipple in Venezuela, where it was cheap and popular, was running low. We needed to do something to keep the party going.

By chance, Gary the Russian walked in with bottles of homemade brew, doing the rounds with
agua loco
(crazy water) on the Sunday afternoon when visits were around to get some sales. They made dozens of bottles of it in the Special. It was clear liquid and didn’t arouse the suspicion of the cops. I waved him over.

‘Paul, you want to buy?’ he said, looking down his pointy nose, which was a bit like a gerbil’s. He had a shifty look and a face that brought to mind a Russian pimp, with bloodshot eyes that were sunk into the back of his head. Any deeper and you could stick your fingers in and pick up his head like a bowling ball.

‘Yeah, how much?’

‘It’s 40,000 bolos,’ he said.

‘Right, give me one.’

He slipped his hand into a plastic bag and gave me the booze in a litre water bottle. I passed a 20,000-bolo note into his hand. He put it into his pocket and left without looking at it. I had lent him a 20 before and he had never paid it back. Now he had, and he’d soon realise it.

The following Sunday Gary was back down in the canteen on his rounds. ‘Paul, you only gave me 20,000 bolos last week. The bottle was 40,000.’

‘Gary, you owed me 20,000 from before and you never paid it. Well, now you have.’ He had stayed in Maxima when he first arrived. He racked up debts on the slate with coke, food in the shop and loans. When he knew the boss was about to call him in for a chat and break his legs he fled to the Special wing upstairs.

‘Paul, it is not my money; it is my boss’s money.’

‘I don’t give a flying fuck. You owed me 20 and now I have it,’ I said, walking past him. Swine thought he could shaft me for a few notes and get away with it.

The lads in Maxima got wind of my tiff with Gary and were joking I should be on the lookout for a reprisal. ‘Watch it with the Russkys, Paul,’ said Billy. Gary’s boss was Fyodor, another Russian, who was forming a loose coalition of inmates in the Special wing from the former Soviet states and its satellites: Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Slovakians, Romanians and so on.

‘The Russian mafia might be after you,’ said Eddy, joking. But the word was the Veno cell-block bosses were watching the Russian gringo daring to set himself up as a boss. The fear was he might try to build up arms and take over a wing. Only a Veno could become a jefe – it was their country and their rules. Cross their line and you’d pay the price.

I was back up on the roof doing my laps and taking in the view. I watched the National Guard troops in the watchtowers: one was chatting away on a mobile phone, standing next to a machine gun propped up on a tripod; in the other tower the soldier was chewing gum and polishing his tinted sunglasses with the sleeve of his uniform. Down below I saw the cesspit of prison rubbish. I also saw the fat mechanic lag from Maxima – he was fast asleep, sitting on the ground, his chin slumped on his chest.

Fyodor the Russian suddenly stood in my path. He was tall, at 6 ft 4 in., with sharp Slavic cheekbones. He was a good six inches inches taller than me. ‘Paul, you owe me money,’ he said, looking down at me. ‘Do you have it?’

‘Are you on about this as well?’ We squared up to each other with our eyes. There were always luceros from each wing on the roof, knives at the ready – so if it came to it the luceros from Maxima would step in and cut Fyodor up. ‘I’ve already told Gary. He owed me 20,000 and now I have it and that’s that.’

‘The other 20,000 you should have paid is mine.’ His eyes locked on me and he moved his upper body forward slightly, trying to crowd me with his height. It was starting to bore me.

‘Gary owed me 20 from before. What goes around comes around.’ I moved around him and continued walking. I didn’t know it then, but Fyodor put out a hit on me.

* * *

‘Alllll rrrigghtttt Paullly, alllll rrrrrighhhhht.’ It was my mate Cummins from Dublin on the phone, shouting over a din of what sounded like people roaring. ‘We’re at the Man United game in Old Trafford.’ That explained it. ‘We won, we’re having a great time.’

It was a Champions League game. I knew because I was watching it on the telly in the wing. ‘I know, I’m looking at it here,’ I shouted back.

‘We’re having a great time, a great time.’ He was there with the lads from home, all Manchester United fans.

‘A good one, Cummins,’ I shouted down the phone. I was pretending I was happy to hear from them. But I hated those calls. The lads also often rang me when they were out boozing. I don’t know what they were thinking. They meant well, keeping me in the loop, but it just reminded me of where I was and where I wanted to be. Pure torture.

It also reminded me of how disconnected I was from my family. I might have been only at the end of a mobile phone, but to my family and friends I felt I was out of sight and out of mind. A few calls a year and that was it. Not that I blamed them for that; it’s just the way it was. I didn’t want the calls anyway. It only messed with my head. I preferred to pretend the outside world didn’t exist till I was back in it.

After the chat I sat back down on my bucket in the hallway in the wing to watch the rest of the game. All the gringos were crowded around the telly: Spanish, Italians, British and so on. Few Venos bothered with it. Baseball was their game.

* * *

For weeks the lags had been working away building a second floor over one half of the yard. Every few days I’d be called out to help carry in materials. There was a truck parked in the driveway at the pedestrian entrance to the cell blocks. One of the lags standing on the back of the lorry lowered down a bag of cement onto my shoulder and I lugged it back to the wing. It was like Sunday afternoon at a B&Q hardware shop.